Is there a way to make the tick marks larger?

Question

In a Plot (actually, a Graphics) command, I'd like to make the actual tick marks larger than they are, but I can't find an option to do that. Is there a way?

Answer 1

As others notes, if you manually give the ticks specification, it's easy to specify sizes for ticks. But then you need to generate all tick mark positions, including small and big marks, yourself.

Unfortunately, I have never found a way to reliably retrieve the automatically generated ticks specification. While @J.M.'s answer tries to do this, you'll notice that AbsoluteOptions doesn't return exactly the same ticks that were generated automatically.

An often recommended alternative is using the CustomTicks package (I learned about it from @Eli and @R.M.). It is also part of LevelScheme, so I recommend you install the latest version of LevelScheme instead. This package will spare you the pain of implementing your own tick-generator functions.

This is how you could use it:

<< LevelScheme`CustomTicks`

Plot[Sin[x], {x, 0, 10}, Ticks -> LinTicks]

Increase the tick sizes generated by the LinTicks functions:

SetOptions[LinTicks, MajorTickLength -> {0.02, 0}, MinorTickLength -> {0.013, 0}];

Plot[Sin[x], {x, 0, 10}, Ticks -> LinTicks]

Documentation for the package is here.

Answer 2

Start with

pt = Plot[Sin[x], {x, 0, 2 Pi}]

Then, to increase the tick size, try the following:

c = 3; (* scale factor *)
tx = Map[MapAt[c # &, #, 3] &, Ticks /. AbsoluteOptions[pt, Ticks], {2}];
Show[pt, Ticks -> tx]

A similar thing can be done if you're using frames (Frame -> True) instead of axes; for that, you use FrameTicks instead of Ticks. See the docs for more details on those (as well as with AbsoluteOptions[]).

Answer 3

From belisarius' comment above:

Plot[Cos[x], 
    {x, 0, 10}, 
    Ticks ->{{{Pi, 180°, .1}, {2 Pi, 360°, .1}, {3 Pi, 540°, .1}}, {-1, 1}}
]